A worker in a modern office environment faces a number of time-related difficulties when planning and carrying out work activities, especially if the worker has many smaller tasks to get done that have changing deadlines or other time limits. The cumulative, interactive effects of frequent new task assignments, shifting task sequence (i.e., the order in which tasks are accomplished), new and changing appointments, overtime/undertime requirements, irregular working times and/or dates, work in different time zones, switching between different activities, and interruptions or distractions on the worker's ability to finish specific tasks within certain time limits are complex and often significant. Therefore, an office worker may find it quite difficult to make a truly rational, reliable estimate of when the worker may accomplish certain tasks or to make advantageous decisions about (re)scheduling one's work. These difficulties lead to scheduling uncertainty which, in turn, may lead to thrashing (i.e., unnecessary multitasking), lowered productivity, jeopardized or missed deadlines, and increased worker stress. College students with heavy course loads face similar problems, as the time available for studying for tests, preparing papers, and/or completing other course-related work is often highly irregular and must be coordinated with fixed obligations such as attending classes. Thus, students may find it difficult to plan their activities in a way that ensures they can complete all required work.
To help manage personal working time, many individuals use a combination of manual and/or automated To Do lists, calendars of appointments and deadlines, and/or planning software such as Gantt charts in order to help schedule and prioritize work activities. Unfortunately, such repositories of information may be maintained separately, although they often are characterized by factual interdependencies. For example, a worker may fail to execute an item on a To Do list because of a conflicting appointment that must be attended. Also for example, a Gantt chart may become outdated when a set of appointments, To Do items, and other schedule-relevant factors that existed at the time the Gantt chart was made have changed. Personal time management using the tools and processes described above may quickly become overwhelming and unworkable because of the effort required to keep calendars or Gantt schedules updated and synchronized on an ongoing basis so that all interdependent, schedule-influencing factors are taken into consideration.
Unfortunately, known personal work-planning software does not address the problems listed above in a unified application context. More specifically, known software does not forecast a work schedule that takes all of the above factors into account, does not instantly respond to changes in these factors, and does not give guidance about how to best adjust the schedule in order to relieve time pressure and/or ensure time limits will not be overrun. Known work planning software tools typically purport to anticipate when project phases will be completed, or milestones will be reached, by taking account of factors such as resource bottlenecks, task dependencies, task priorities, and planned events in order to calculate time ranges within which tasks or groups of tasks are likely to get accomplished. However, such tools are typically designed to schedule work for multiple resources acting in parallel.
Known work planning tools often present schedules using some form of calendar-scaled Gantt chart (i.e., a Gantt chart in which the task bars extend horizontally over a time grid demarcated at regular calendrical boundaries such as years, months, weeks or days). On such a Gantt chart, each task bar is normally calculated on the basis of estimated effort, but is presented on the grid as an estimated duration (or range of durations) within which work on the task is expected to take place. To ensure that a given resource is not scheduled to do more than one thing at a time, known software may apply techniques such as automatic resource leveling and automatic schedule calculation based on task priorities. As a basis for calculating the schedule of individual workers, project managers may enter the weekdays and times when the workers are expected to be available for work, and may subtract from this basis the amount of time that workers are anticipated to spend on non-project-related activities. Such configured work-availability times, as well as events having fixed start and finish times that fall within the configured work-availability times, may then be taken into account when the schedule is calculated.
The macro-level resource modeling approach described above can be useful for project management purposes, where it is helpful to know the ranges of probable project phase completion dates, Inaccuracies in the assumptions on which the calculated project schedules are based (for example, the time intervals when a given resource will actually be available for working) often will cancel each other out over longer time horizons, as long as the assumptions are correct on average. However, for an individual, such as a student or office worker, who performs several smaller tasks per day, who works on a “just-in-time” basis with little margin for delays, who has irregular working hours, who works in relatively unstable environments with multiple superiors making conflicting demands, and/or who works in different time zones, such macro-level modeling tools do not give sufficiently responsive or accurate prescriptive guidance, at a useful time resolution, about activities upon which the person should focus effort at a given specific time in order to meet his or her obligations, or about how the person's work schedule could best be adjusted in order to account for changing circumstances.
Thus, an industry need exists to provide methods, systems, and architectures capable of facilitating visualization and continuous tracking of the immediate and future effects of schedule-influencing factors in a unified context that is easy to understand and to keep current, and which assists individuals in actively avoiding scheduling pressures before they occur. While known solutions are directed to time management issues in general, none allow an individual to visualize his personal work schedule and see how interruptions and other factors will impact that schedule so that corrective measures can be taken. Nor do known automated time management solutions generate a series of screens that allow an individual to generate a schedule showing tasks in a To Do list and indicating how much time is available between a task and its time limits for actually focusing effort on the task, and to adjust that schedule as needed in order to avoid violating the limits. Nor do known automated time management solutions employ an interruption experience factor to automatically adjust the scheduling of tasks to compensate for interruptions that typically occur during a work day.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,247,438 to Subas et al., titled “Personal Time Management System and Method,” (hereinafter “the '438 patent”) discloses a computer system that generates a primary visual display including individual event time bars and a composite conflict time bar. The event time bars graphically display times for scheduled events using visual markers occupying one or more slot times on selected bars. The composite conflicts time bar simultaneously displays all the visual markers of the event time bars in order to provide a positive indication of a conflict. However, the '438 patent does not disclose the ability to track interruptions, nor the employment of an interruption experience factor to automatically adjust the scheduling of tasks to compensate for interruptions.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.